AS BUILDING SPREE NEARS, BE CAREFUL

It came in on a wave of postwar prosperity, rolled up its sleeves and changed Hartford cataclysmically, beyond recognition. Tonight, it may give up the ghost.

If the city's new economic development commission gets under way in the next few weeks, as expected, tonight's meeting of the Hartford Redevelopment Agency will be its last.

On Jan. 25, the city council passed ordinances creating the regional, public-private Economic Development Commission and dissolving the redevelopment agency. The new commission will assume the redevelopment agency's functions, beginning at its first meeting.

It's hard to look out a window in most of the city and not see a redevelopment agency project. The redevelopers started by leveling the old East Side for Constitution Plaza, then went on to build or remake much of downtown, including the Civic Center, Windsor Street, Bushnell Plaza, the Underwood area, Sheldon- Charter Oak, Congress Street, the North Meadows, Colt Park South, SAND. They built thousands of units of housing throughout most of the city.

Analyzing this body of work, as the city embarks on its biggest building spree in a generation, one lesson suggests itself. Be very careful. The redevelopment agency was good at what it did. But what it did, especially in the early years, wasn't always good for the city.

The agency was founded in 1950, to get a hand into Uncle Sam's pocket.

Whether America's cities needed massive federal intervention after World War II is still open to question, but that was the thinking. Federal officials believed cities could be saved if deteriorated buildings were replaced. They offered to pay two- thirds of the cost, via the Housing Act of 1949.

Connecticut cities, perhaps unfortunately, were quick out of the blocks. New Haven had one of the first applications in and Hartford wasn't far behind.

When Constitution Plaza opened in the early '60s, it won all sorts of awards. But soon it came to be seen as a sterile office park that did little for the central business district, at the cost of a colorful, largely Italian neighborhood that might have been rehabbed into something like the North End of Boston.

"We were babes in the woods. These ideas were untested. We hadn't done this kind of 'big government' fix before," said Steve Goddard, who covered the agency for The Hartford Times in the 1960s, and is now a downtown lawyer. "The intentions were noble."

As with books or paintings, time can change perspective on buildings. Former Deputy Mayor Bob Ludgin supported CityPlace in the early '80s. Now he wonders if it was a good idea to build a 38-story building that drained clients out of the buildings around it, creating more of a skyline than a city. Would more five- or six-story buildings have left a more functional and comfortable downtown, he asked. Perhaps.

Probate Judge Bob Killian said the city was too quick to demolish historic buildings "to replace our heritage with somebody else's ideas." It's easy to get carried away; the etchings of new buildings always look great.

Of course, many redevelopment projects have been great successes. The Civic Center, especially the Coliseum, has anchored downtown. The Stilts Building, the Gold Building, etc., have brought thousands of jobs downtown.

The 750-acre North Meadows project, under way since the late '60s, replaced an incinerator and a drive-in with scores of businesses and millions in tax revenue. One could argue there are too many car dealerships, which take up a lot of land for not too many jobs, and not enough manufacturers, but the Meadows is still a vibrant business area.

Housing has to be renovated every so often. The agency allowed some junk to be built years ago, but in recent years has commissioned some quite attractive buildings.

The redevelopment agency has been criticized over the years for being too slow and bureaucratic. That may be a strength, one the new agency shouldn't forget. Development takes time. The agency has held developers to rules, for example, not selling land until developers had a real plan backed with real money. The agency has been ably led over the years, by Bob Bliss, Larry Thompson and, for the past eight years, by Madelyn Colon.

To blame the agency for what we aren't happy with is like blaming Vietnam on the Army. The agency is an arm of the city. When there was strong city leadership, good things were done. Where things went wrong, city leadership didn't have a clear and well-thought-out vision of what it wanted from redevelopment. The hurried and secretive stadium process invites the same mistakes and unintended consequences we rue about Constitution Plaza.